Here’s the problem, say you are a scientist or researcher, you have been working on a project for two or three years and you have a lot of data, and you would like to begin to process it. But your budget is limited, your technology is limited, and your time is limited. Yet you would like to gather an answer, or several answers as quickly as possible.

Cloud Computing from StrataScale

Can you afford to wait months to have an IT department come to your assistance and run the applications for you. Maybe they are not even an internal IT department, what if they are an outside consulting firm that specializes in data processing for large raw databases? Maybe they can produce the answers you need at a reasonable price, or maybe not.

This is where cloud computing can come in.

Cloud Computing

By using servers hosted on the Internet for computational purposes, cloud computing vendors can build Internet accessible data centers and sell computing operations at an affordable price because the server is available to many users, unlike traditional IT servers which can serve only a few clients.

The Economies of Scale

As our example showed, it may not be economically feasible to have a large computational server onsite that will only provide data processing operations for a select few number of users, even if their database computations may be extremely large. It departments may not be able to provide the economic justification for the extra-computing power that is needed for large scale systems.

On the other hand, universities across the country can  have hundreds of small tech rooms, which is beginning to look like a bad idea.   You can have several endemic problems, one that it may not be environmentally friendly, two that management for such operations can be very ad hoc, and finally people lose data. So why trust the onsite operations to service the data requests with these problems hovering in the background, when a central site can exist that will do the data management, the server management, and concentrate it in one location that can be easy on the environment.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most researchers only need to use their data center once in a while. As budgets are tight now, most scientists and researchers would prefer to spend their grant dollars elsewhere.

For many researchers, the inability to truly access a data center or even to have an IT computer that is available to them speaks about their solution, they run a set of desktop computers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, slowly wringing out the computational processes they need to get their answers.

The Community Research Project

As data grows, and the need to make computer access necessary, cloud computing can provide the processing to reach across a large geographic scale to let multiple researchers work together to identify and solve their research needs.

Some of the issues that still have to be worked out are licensing issues as well as support. Since the central site can host not just the hardware, but also the software involved to process the research; such details still need to be worked.

Cloud Computing Sites

Currently there exist several sites that can provide client-cloud computing. GoGrid.com is a company that can provide such services, and have  a variety of service plans, including cloud and hybrid computing.

Go Grid

OpSource Cloud has other features that they tout in the Cloud computing experience, like security, and private networks, as well as servers with different operating systems, Windows, Linux, and CentOS.

OpSource-Cloud Architecture

StrataScale Offers the typical server systems, scalability, storage capacity, firewalls and security, but they also offer their clients their own operational server.

Video Demo from StrataScale: httpv://www.stratascale.com/physical-cloud-demo#axzz0f5fGOsQO

Research Source: Microsoft

Microsoft and the National Science Foundation Enable Research in the Cloud